In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, life in the town of Easley, South Carolina, was tense for Leigh Drexler. Pick-up trucks with airborne Confederate flags seemed more prevalent than ever before, and her grandparents—who had never voted in their lives—registered to cast their ballots for the Donald himself.

Drexler felt isolated. “My family has always directed their point of view at me, but it has been a million times worse than normal,” she told me last October. “Every time we’re in a conversation, it’s either about the election or religion.”

It’s a dynamic that led Drexler, who identifies as a democratic socialist and an atheist, to go online in search of a therapist—someone who would perhaps better understand her lack of faith. She scouted towns within a 20-mile radius, but only “faith-based” practitioners turned up. She resorted to distance counseling over the phone with a therapist a few states away. “I knew there would be Christian counselors here, but I didn’t think that was all I was going to find,” she said.

But for many non-believers living in the country’s most religious regions, namely the Bible Belt and parts of the Midwest, the idea that religion in America is somehow eroding seems foreign, if not far-fetched. Despite the overall decline in religiosity over the past decade, around 70 percent of Americans still identify as Christian, currently making the U.S. home to more Christians than any other place in the world.

So what does that mean for atheists, agnostics, secularists, and “nones” living in the country’s most faithful pockets? Well, historically, a kind of culture war, where the separation of church and state is hotly debated in places like restaurants, schools, and the workplace. However, in recent years, a more understated and intimate clash over religious liberties has been playing out—only this time, it’s on a therapist’s couch.

* * *

Sigmund Freud once called religion the “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity,” setting the tone for a long-fractured relationship between psychology and theology. Although tensions between the two domains have softened over the past few decades, the tête-à-tête persists, in part because they are devoted to a similar purpose: explaining the intricacies of the human mind, and soul.

The degree to which “He” fits into the mix can vary. From Christian rehabilitation centers and biblical life coaches to religious private practices, spiritual counselors, and something as contentious as conversion therapy, Christian groups have been adopting mental health as a new frontier in recent years. And at the forefront of this trend are faith-based therapies, which have reportedly experienced a surge in popularity over the last decade.

Some practitioners point to substance-rehabilitation programs as the driving force behind this surge. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, for instance, traditionally come to a close by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and six of the famous 12 steps cite “God,” “Him,” or “a Power greater than ourselves.” “The chemical-dependency field really began to integrate spirituality long before the mental-health field,” says Gregory Jantz, the founder of The Center: A Place of Hope, a faith-based treatment center in Washington that specializes in depression and anxiety. For Jantz, who is a licensed mental-health counselor, acknowledging the prospect of a higher power can be integral to a person’s well-being. “‘Why am I on this planet? What's my purpose? Who am I?’ Those are questions that are often addressed by looking at faith,” he says.

“I’m also very careful about advertising that I’m a Christian counselor.”

Last April, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed legislation that would allow psychologists and therapists to deny patients based on their own “sincerely held principles.” The controversial move prompted the American Counseling Association to cancel its annual conference in Nashville, on the basis that the law targeted the LGBTQ community. The gesture was political—something both therapists and Christian-counseling networks condemned—but it also exposed a growing conversation, or concern, about the presence of religion in the field of mental health.

For many clients who aren’t religious, like Drexler, this concern has been a reality for some time. “Their entire lives have been wrapped up in religion, and they were raised and socialized to have that be everything,” says Patricia Guzikowski, a licensed professional counselor based in Wisconsin. “It is hard for them to make a transition.”

Guzikowski provides distance counseling for clients throughout the U.S., many of whom identify as atheists living in religious communities. She’s spoken with women who are afraid of losing custody of their children during a divorce, as a result of losing their faith. She’s counseled ex-Mormons and former Jehovah’s Witnesses secretly over the phone or through email conversations, so that their families and friends do not find out.

Reddit threads are filled with similar stories of people seeking guidance after religious renunciation. An atheist teenager, whose dad is a preacher, asks for help on how to cope with a loss of faith. In Alabama, one person searches for a non-religious therapist to deal with depression. Another, in Dallas, seeks a secular trauma counselor for PTSD.

And then there’s “Grief Beyond Belief,” a support network on Facebook for people who have lost a loved one and want to grieve faith-free. “If you’re grieving without a belief that you’re going to be reunified or that your loved one is somewhere better, your needs are really different,” Rebecca Hensler, the group’s founder, says.

Hensler started the page shortly after the death of her infant son in 2009, and was surprised by the response. She saw stories that read like her own: parents who weren’t comforted by the idea that their baby was now “in Heaven,” or that death might be anything other than death itself. Today, the page has nearly 20,000 likes. Users post daily about what it’s like to mourn alongside pressures from family, friends, or their counselors. “I couldn’t count the number of posts from people who share stories about being in therapy, and then the therapist offers to pray with them or talks about Heaven,” Hensler says. “It’s so profoundly harmful to that therapeutic relationship.”

What groups like Grief Beyond Belief ultimately hint at is a basic ideological divide in the way Americans deal with their problems: Some people are comforted at the thought of a higher power, while others are repelled by it. Applying a similar logic to therapy, people want counselors who share their beliefs and can understand their struggles. Perhaps that is part of the reason faith-based counseling has garnered strength in recent years: For religious patients and therapists who’ve felt underrepresented in a traditionally secular therapeutic community, these programs represent an invaluable part of their identity.

“I identify as a female, wife, daughter, aunt, and Catholic,” says Jill Duba Sauerheber, a licensed clinical counselor in Kentucky. “But I’m also very careful about advertising that I’m a Christian counselor, because I'm a counselor—that’s what I am. … When you label yourself as anything, you automatically begin to narrow your client pool, and potential clients can make assumptions about you.”

* * *

Regardless of approach, religious and secular therapists share a fundamental question: If the purpose of psychotherapy is to remain a theoretical “blank slate,” how much does a patient benefit from knowing a therapist’s personal beliefs? How much should a practitioner reveal?

These are questions my stepmother, Donna, raised two years ago when she hoped to find work at a private practice near her home in Dallas, Texas. At the time, she perused local counseling websites—none of which identified as being Christian—and noticed a common trend: During the application process, some employers wanted a “statement of faith,” while others asked what church she belonged to. “I was like, ‘What does that mean? I don't understand what that has to do with counseling and my work,’” she says.

Caleb Lack, a clinical psychologist based in Oklahoma, has heard similar concerns. “We have lots of people—particularly in the Bible Belt or Deep South—who think, ‘If it becomes known that I am an atheist, there goes part of my practice,’” he says.

“According to our evidence-based practice guidelines, prayer for depression is not one of them.”

Lack is the director of the Secular Therapy Project, or STP, a program designed to connect non-religious people with mental-health services in their local area. As an offshoot of the non-profit “Recovering From Religion,” STP currently has more than 10,000 users who can search the online database for counselors around the world.

To join the website as a therapist, applicants must be secular, possess a state license, and employ what’s known as evidence-based practice in their work, i.e., base their psychological approach on scientific research. Lack says the scrutiny is to avoid any confusion between patients and therapists when it finally comes time to meet, especially in more radical cases. “I met someone who was suffering from depression and their therapist told them, ‘Well, the reason you’re depressed is because the devil is putting thoughts in your head. So we have to pray more now,’” Lack says. “It’s like, ‘Well, wait, I think according to our evidence-based practice guidelines, prayer for depression is not one of them.’”

As faith-based therapies have branched out of the clergy, they’ve taken on different approaches—and credentials. Biblical counselors, for example, reject the psychotherapeutic model, and claim their title simply by expressing a devotion to Jesus Christ and sometimes completing one of several available training courses. It’s a distinction they feel sets them apart from Christian counselors, who tend to employ secular psychology through a Christian perspective. Nevertheless, Christian counselors often do not have to obtain a degree or special certification to practice. Pastoral counselors, on the other hand, are often ministers, priests, or rabbis, and the American Association of Pastoral Counselors only accepts people with postgraduate degrees from accredited universities.

It’s precisely this kind of gray area that secular therapists do not take lightly, yet it should be said that every practitioner I interviewed for this article made a point to clarify that there are, undoubtedly, qualified counselors who are privately religious but keep their personal beliefs out of the office—or who are openly religious but properly credentialed. In a similar vein, many patients do wish to talk about faith, and some experts have reported that a “spirituality integrated” clinical approach can be as effective as other treatments.

That is why programs like STP don’t intend to hamper faith-based therapy, but rather, draw a more distinct line for people in search of secular help. In any therapeutic relationship, regardless of belief, there is a certain level of betrayal in an absence of transparency. When a patient confides their innermost thoughts with a therapist only to later discover after many sessions (and dollars) that they are completely unfit for one another, the experience can be damaging.

It was for Tiffany Russell. Her decision to seek therapy wasn’t easy; she operated a trucking company in Oklahoma City and only had so many free hours. She had to find a practitioner who accepted her insurance—and had to confront years of emotional abuse for the first time.

“It took me awhile to get the nerve up, but my first couple of sessions were uneventful,” Russell says. “There wasn’t anything to suggest there would be an issue.” The therapist had a Ph.D. in counseling, and never identified her practice as faith-based, so she continued the sessions.

“I was comfortable seeing her, and we were getting more into the issues that I was having with my father. She stopped me at one point and goes, ‘Well, you know, your real Father loves you,’” Russell says.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The preacher, dead at 99, advised presidents, mentored clergy, and influenced millions of people. Will his legacy of non-partisan outreach continue?

Billy Graham, the famous preacher who reached millions of people around the world through his Christian ministry, died on Wednesday at 99. Over the course of more than six decades, he reshaped the landscape of evangelism, sharing the gospel from North Carolina to North Korea and developing innovative ways to communicate the message of the Bible. He influenced generations of pastors and developed friendships with presidents, prime ministers, and royalty around the world. His death marks the end of an era for evangelicalism, and poses a fundamental question: Will his legacy of bipartisan, ecumenical outreach be carried forward?

Graham came up as a preacher during the post-war era, a time when American Christianity was being radically remade. “When Billy came on the scene, fundamentalism, as it’s called, was really prevalent,” said Greg Laurie, the pastor of the California megachurch Harvest Christian Fellowship and member of the board of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, in an interview. “Billy wanted to broaden the base and reach more people.”

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.